So having completely failed to post between New Year and now, you’ve been spared any ramblings for a while.
I’m sat on a very cold hard floor in Chambery airport having now finished my snow holidays and waiting for the flight back. One concussion and one cracked helmet later, but no major injuries from two weeks snowboarding and skiing – I’d call that a result!
Previous posts were mostly talking the talk but it’s time to walk the walk – I’ve been a busy boy with my calendar and my credit card.
Bearing in mind I’ve raced two regionals in my life, a look at my current race calendar would convince you I’d taken complete leave of my senses and all notions of self preservation.
Along with the Ginger One more commonly referred to as Tom Bellingham, the chaos of the Megavalanche is now booked. In a moment of madness I also entered the extra race during the Mega week – the Enduro En Oisans (Enduro D’Oz). Two races at altitude in less than a week!
But I’ve got to survive that long first. April and May see the first two races of my season – national races at both Grizedale and Dyfi – both EWS qualifiers.
Now let’s be real, I’m not going to qualify for the big show, but alongside the third qualifying even at Kinlochleven in November these will give me an EWS qualifying rank and that’s progress.
So on touchdown at Birmingham it’s less than 10 weeks to Grizedale and the learning curve is now as steep as the tracks. Let’s get back to work.
My last post covered the areas of my riding that are deficient in terms of operating at the level required to succeed – which we determined together was all of them! In an effort to begin to understand and address the mobility question I was lucky enough to snag a place on a December training workshop with Alan Milway of MX Fitness (early Christmas present from my parents – bosh!) with a group of other MTB and MX athletes (I use the term loosely, I’m still more of an ‘afflete’ with a double-F) to understand and screen our fitness & mobility in support of strategically planning the work to be completed over the winter months.
Alan has coached countless world champions including a period with the Athertons, and works a lot out of the high performance lab at the University Of Birmingham, so I was excited to be getting some time with a man who quite clearly has a plan! Along with Ray Jakeman, a strength & conditioning coach, he spent the day working us through a range of activities and drills to assess and educate us on effective training principles and our personal mobility characteristics – seeking out imbalance or weakness across muscle groups.
Through the mobility activities, it was amazing to see Alan & Ray dissect the movement patterns of the group members and feed back the physiological reasons for the resulting motion. Everyone on the session learned a great deal about the strongest and weakest elements of their mobility, including it’s effect on specific scenarios on the bike. I came away with an increased appreciation for my body as a system, and significantly more understanding of my requirements to achieve optimum mobility on the bike – better get the foam roller out!
We moved into some core fitness & robustness screening exercises and then onto more performance based tests back in the lab – including, for the MTB racers in the group – the dreaded repeat sprint test.
Now I’ve always been fascinated by the repeat sprint test, you sometimes see high level riders complete this test on TV if you’re watching a documentary about racing, but I’ve never done one. The test definition for us was 10 repeated sprints, 6 seconds on and 30 seconds off. Out of the saddle, leave nothing in the tank. Alan would measure our power output each sprint, and make a judgement how many of the 10 efforts were worth completing based on whether our output was no longer remaining consistent. I was pretty happy with getting to 7 sprints at a very consistent and respectable power output, so I’ve gained a new love for this test despite the suffering!
One of the best elements of the session was the transition from a group of strangers with common goals to the dynamic experienced during the final performance based tests, with plenty of encouragement and pushing each other to excel during the bike sprints and the row for the MX guys.
I’m looking forward to receiving the formal feedback and results package in the new year to fully understand my baseline for training. If like me you’re starting out and trying to establish a base of knowledge I would thoroughly recommend getting involved in this session if a similar event comes up again – I can’t rate Alan and Ray highly enough.
A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing but this workshop has laid the foundations for some real improvements ahead.
We’re going to need a strategy. Given the inability to train twice a day, and the lack of someone making my meals and feeding me power boosting fruit smoothies to within a 60 second accuracy window, we’re going to need something a bit more realistic.
I’m no huge stranger to training plans, lacrosse & MMA put me in the gym fairly frequently – but this is a little different. Let’s break it down.
First off, I’m not fit enough. It’s as simple as that. I’m not necessarily unfit, but I am not fit enough. Transitions between race stages – less of an issue, ability to run at redline power through a race stage – big problem. Base fitness for efficient transitions and threshold level efforts for dropping the hammer are both needed. Put it on the list
Secondly, I’m not strong enough. Absolute strength and strength endurance are both lacking. Now these two are interesting, maybe I’ll write about this again as I continue to research, but here goes for the first crack.
I’m talking about absolute maximal strength versus repeated, extended exertion.
Sprinting takes leg strength, sprinting at every possible opportunity in a race run anywhere from 2 to 8 minutes, takes strength endurance. Straight up strength will get you off the line and out of the first few features, but strength endurance will allow you to power through the rest of the stage – remember we’re racing, this isn’t a trail centre roll.
It simplifies down to the capacity of your body to call on as much of your strength as possible at any given moment, to continue to output force and place body & bike in the optimal position to attack. Grip strength is a similar example, you may be able to crush a melon with your hands like a beast, but if you can only do it once then it’s not much use to your ability to brake or steer after 5 minutes of technical descent – I can currently do neither, the melons and the podium both remain safe.
Now if any trainers or coaches are reading this then please feel free to shout up with clarifications, but so far I’ve got weight, and volume [1] & [2] as the key components, so we’ll throw those into the mix alongside riding hard and see how they contribute. Strength training also develops the connections between mind and muscle (neuromuscular pathways) which, as I understand it, allows a more efficient response to the demands placed on your muscles. Strength, in all it’s applied forms – get it on the list.
The often neglected final component, and I find myself guilty, is flexibility & mobility. Optimal use of muscle requires the minimum of impingements & if flexibility work is good enough for trials legend Ryan Leech it’s good enough for me. We need to reduce imbalance to let the whole body work as a system, not to mention that I have no illusions as to the probability of crashing during training and racing, making mobility & flexibility also key.
So that’s the list – I’m taking some time to read up, educate myself, and build a plan.
The next major milestone is December 17th when I’ll be working with Alan Milway to get an idea of the training he carries out with his elite athletes, I anticipate big things from this session to consolidate my own planning and lock down a strategy moving forward.
The concept of ‘New Year New Me’ grates on me, if something needs to be changed then it needs to be changed now, but this started as one – ‘ride more’ – after a disappointing 2015 with limited time on the bike for whatever reasons; struggling to tie up with friends, people stepping away from riding, it doesn’t really matter – there I was, writing on a post-it stuck to the kitchen door.
What matters is that during 2016 ‘ride more’ seemed to work. I got back on top, more road riding to keep me going during the week if I couldn’t get tyres on dirt, a 50 mile round trip commute on the road bike once a week, I accepted riding alone when others weren’t free. Gained some fitness, gained some speed – resolution well on the way to being fulfilled.
In the few years I’ve ridden mountain bikes ‘properly’ as a hobby I never stepped up to race. I thought about it, talked about it, read about it, watched it, and dithered around the idea but it always remained undermined by doubts – “too expensive”, “not fast enough to even start at the bottom”, “too much commitment to write off entire weekends”. The drive to win outweighed the fundamental principle of riding my bike and prevented me from accepting failure in the persuit of process, progress and improvement, despite the core trait of wanting to be tested. I failed to realise that to win, you have to risk losing. I talked myself down, the itch to test myself went away and without a defined goal, there I was, 2 years later writing ‘ride more’ on a piece of paper to open 2016.
Fast forward a few months and more serious planning of a group roadtrip to the Megavalanche 2017 (we’d all been threatening this for about 3 years, procrastinating the whole time, starting to see a theme?) drove the lubricated (see : drunken) conversation around racing some enduro in the UK to ramp up fitness, skill and try to avoid going in totally blind.
The overall group consensus was no, but we’d flicked a switch; the itch was back.
This time the doubts were met with fire. Racing may not have got any cheaper but what’s money? Can’t take it with you. Speed, fitness and race winning pace are built. I’d built them back up this far after a limited 2015, why not further?
I came back to what stopped me before – my own mental battle between failure and the desire to win, and struggled to think of any achievement where I’d started at the top, or even halfway there. Take a minute, it’s likely that you can’t list anything either and if you can, it probably preceded a fairly rapid step up to the next level rather than cruising at the top of a standard where you weren’t growing.
** This is your minute, 59, 58,57…. **
Anything? Not for me, not a thing. College & university – day 1, blank notebook, zero knowledge. Grind, repeat, graduate. Learning to snowboard – first lesson, slam, slam slam, heal, go again, slam, repeat. Organically, the pieces drop into place. Sometimes you bring some skill or knowledge when you open a new door, but ultimately, every new path starts with nothing.
I’ve never been good at setting sensible goals – I’m like that really annoying terrier on the park who still barks at an Alsatian – but it’s served me well this far in getting me out of the other side of my education in one piece, and into a job that allows me to make the most of my free time by generally larking around on mud or snow covered mountains.
On that basis, for better or worse, I’ll keep swinging for the fence.
The Enduro World Series (EWS) is the pinnacle of enduro racing – so that seems lofty enough for the terrier. Now the EWS is not a ‘pay up and show up’ series, and there are an untold number of Alsatians standing in the way – truth be told I don’t even fully understand what I need to do to get there but I know enough for now – you can race as privateer.
Racing life lesson – know enough to get going – then get going.
I already said I don’t do resolutions, so lets not call this decision one. To cement this as a proactive decision and not a wooly resolution based on an ill conceived concept of self improvement needing to happen once a year, I grabbed the last 2 rounds of the Welsh Gravity Enduro Series at Cwmcarn & Afan.
Poor results, expectedly, as a small fish dipping a fin into a massively talented pond (given the volume of world class riders from the UK across tarmac, track and dirt, amateur level was bound to be high) but no major crashes, no mechanicals, and the chance to get my race-face on, 2 years overdue.
So that was then, and this is it. 12 months ago – ‘ride more’. Now – ‘race’.
Race for fun, race smart, race every opportunity I get and whatever it takes – race the Enduro World Series.
My name is Tom Grinyer, and I am finally an enduro racer.
Between The Tape 